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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27115033">"Portrait of J.M." by Matthew Michael Murdock</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlestars/pseuds/brittlestars'>brittlestars</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Daredevil (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Supersenses and how to have them, art as an allegory for life</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 17:27:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,039</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27115033</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlestars/pseuds/brittlestars</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack Murdock is proud of his son: Even before his accident, Matty always saw the world a little differently. As an adult, Matt reflects on how the senses he's gained reveal stories weaving around him like so many splatters of paint.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jonathan "Jack" Murdock &amp; Matt Murdock</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>60</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Daredevil Bingo</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>"Portrait of J.M." by Matthew Michael Murdock</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/gifts">deniigiq</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Matt vaguely remembers seeing a Jackson Pollock painting when he was a child. It was a photo, of course. The Murdocks only ever saw original art in person as statues and paintings inside of a cathedral, or maybe the graphic design of a poster announcing a fight. </p><p>Pollock's droplets and sprays of seemingly random color stopped him, held him rapt.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p><br/>
<br/>
Jackson Pollock's <i>Portrait of H.M.</i><br/>
</p>
</div><p>His dad had chuckled. "Wish I could get famous for making a mess." But when he saw Matt linger on the image, Jack Murdock grew more serious. "You like it, Matty?"</p><p>Matt nodded. "Yea."</p><p>Jack pulled up a rickety library chair, too small for his frame, and sat next to his son. "I don't get it," he said, "this 'Modern Art' stuff. Explain it to me." He admitted his ignorance with zero shame. He looked to his son with every confidence that Matt could understand and explain. </p><p>Matt shrugged, small fingers curling - but never creasing - the page of the magazine. </p><p>"It's just different, I guess. You can see whatever you want in it."</p><p>Jack narrowed his eyes at Matt, but Matt was intent, so then the older man focused on the reproduction of the painting. After a moment: "Nope. Still don't see nothin'. But I'm not surprised you do, Matty. You're better than your old man ever could be."</p><p>Matt disagreed but said nothing. </p><p>A few months later, he was blinded. But not before his dad had spent probably too much money on a color Xerox copy of the magazine page with the Pollock painting. </p><p>After his dad has died and the well-creased color copy is long lost in the shuffle from foster care to the orphanage, Matt rolls over in the unfamiliar and unkind sheets. He can't sleep. He's finally realized what he wished he could have explained to his dad, back at the library. If Matt could go back, he would have told his dad: The painting's not a mess. It's a story.</p><p>Like the stories of the bruises on his father's face, layer under layer for fight after fight. Like the crooked hook of a smile smoothing deep furrows around his eyes when he came home to his son. Like the ending to that story, cold and rigid under Matt's tiny hands. </p><p>The police took him aside for questioning, asked him again and again, "Are you sure? You sure that's your dad?"</p><p>How could he not know? The story's right there, cold and dead under his searching fingertips. He sewed that brow, kissed that cheek, iced that jaw, washed those lips, all a dozen times over. What son needed eyes to know their father? </p><p>Eventually his neighbors came out and told their version of the story. It had a lot more words. It had a lot fewer details. They didn't see all of the layers, how experiences added up over the years. The police eventually gave Matt to some other people who took him away, asking more pointless, shallow questions. The questioning strangers promised Matt he could start a new story when all he wanted was to be part of the same one, over and over again.</p><p>Over the next few months, a series of people who often fail to introduce themselves ask him if he's okay, how he's feeling, if he needs anything. They ask and ask and ask, but they never listen in a way that lets him express his inner world, his pulsing, seething fire. Instead, he learns to answer their broad questions in specific points. He directs them to one instant, one detail at a time. He can't explain everything he's feeling and they don't explain anything that's going to happen to him. The confusion is mutual, parasitic. Foster care is a failure of storytelling, elevated to Modern Art. </p><p>Life goes on. Matt moves into the orphanage permanently. The nuns don't ask too many private questions, but they do hold him when he cries. He can read a lot about them in those hugs.</p><p>He graduates high school, goes to college. He's steadier, confident in his ability to navigate the world his own way. There's nobody there to hold him but by then he's convinced he doesn't need it.</p><p>He meets his best friend. They get law degrees and pass the bar and get an entry-level internship and leave the internship. They found Nelson &amp; Murdock and Matt swears it's like the layers of apparent disaster are aligning into something beautiful. </p><p>Matt never sees another painting, but all the while he lives one.</p><p>Crouching on a roof and sifting through the sounds and smells and feels and all the other inputs from the city at night is like trying to make sense of a Jackson Pollock painting. He has to single out one color, and tell a story with it. A few slow, fat drops here, a slashing spray across the canvas, then a mingle with the blues and greens before dribbling out. The world is telling him a story in pieces, and he gets to see that story through the noise of a hundred, a thousand other stories. </p><p>The painting is all around him. It is in him. It is pulsing and swirling and fading and exploding, fast and slow, lingering and sudden. </p><p>His dad had given up understanding Pollock's 'Modern Art.' Too much for an old, bottom-tier washout of a fighter. </p><p>But his dad had never given up on Matt's capability to understand. When he most needed to make sense of the world, Battlin' Jack Murdock looked to his son.</p><p>And Matt will not disappoint.</p><p>So he remembers the Pollock painting in the dusty air of the childhood library and he stills his inner self and he searches to assemble together a story out of a chaos of too many pieces. </p><p>The best part about these stories is that as he discovers them he can affect change. He gets to decide the outcome. Daredevil does, anyway. Jumping in and changing the story for the better is worth a hundred Jackson Pollock paintings. It's worth everything in the world.</p><p>Daredevil cocks his head as he catches a thread that needs his particular attention. He grins, wraps himself in darkness, and wades through a world on fire.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>"J.M." refers to Jack Murdock.</p><hr/><p>This fic fills my "taken in for questioning" square for Daredevil Bingo.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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